Category: security

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security

Project Zero: Over The Air: Exploiting Broadcom’s Wi-Fi Stack (Part 1)

A new vulnerability discovered by Project Zero affects tons of smart phones (iPhone, Nexus, Samsung S*). The attack proceeds silently over WiFi – you wouldn’t see any indication you have been hacked. For iPhone users, iOS 10.3.1 fixes this. Android users? Good luck.

In this two-part blog series, we’ll explore the exposed attack surface introduced by Broadcom’s Wi-Fi SoC on mobile devices. … The first blog post will focus on exploring the Wi-Fi SoC itself; we’ll discover and exploit vulnerabilities which will allow us to remotely gain code execution on the chip. In the second blog post, we’ll further elevate our privileges from the SoC into the the operating system’s kernel. Chaining the two together, we’ll demonstrate full device takeover by Wi-Fi proximity alone, requiring no user interaction.

Source: Project Zero: Over The Air: Exploiting Broadcom’s Wi-Fi Stack (Part 1)

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privacy security

Dishwasher has directory traversal bug

More IoT fun. Time to hack someone’s dishwasher. Yup, suddenly spying microwaves aren’t that crazy an idea.

Don’t say you weren’t warned: Miele went full Internet-of-Things with a dishwasher, gave it a web server and now finds itself on the wrong end of a bug report and it’s accused of ignoring.

Source: Dishwasher has directory traversal bug

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privacy security

LastPass hit by password stealing and code execution vulnerabilities | ZDNet

Oh dear. Password manager with vulnerabilities. The team response is troubling to say the least. Lets hope they are really more competent than that.

In an eyebrow-raising declaration, according to Ormandy, LastPass had said they couldn’t get his code execution exploit to work, however the security researcher was calling the Windows Calculator executable in his code, while LastPass was examining the code on a Mac.

Google cyber-sleuth Tavis Ormandy has returned to examining LastPass, and a new lot of vulnerabilities have been discovered.

Source: LastPass hit by password stealing and code execution vulnerabilities | ZDNet

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security

Virtual machine escape fetches $105,000 at Pwn2Own hacking contest [updated]

Get this: you are running Microsoft Edge in a VM and visiting a website. Your VM gets compromised and the malware jumps out of the VM to the host. The Qihoo security team has been coming up with a number of very impressive hacks.

Hack worked by stitching together three separate exploits.

Source: Virtual machine escape fetches $105,000 at Pwn2Own hacking contest [updated]

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privacy security

Incident report on memory leak caused by Cloudflare parser bug

This is quite serious. A lot of small (and not so small) websites uses Cloudflare for CDN and DDoS protection. The issue reported by Google’s Project Zero team indicates that a bug in Cloudflare’s processing causes potentially sensitive information to be leaked. This is already bad, but it is made worse due to caching servers keeping a copy of those information. Someone is compiling a list of notable websites affected. You are advised to change your passwords on those affected websites.

Last Friday, Tavis Ormandy from Google’s Project Zero contacted Cloudflare to report a security problem with our edge servers. He was seeing corrupted web pages being returned by some HTTP requests run through Cloudflare. It turned out that in some unusual circumstances, which I’ll detail below, our edge

Source: Incident report on memory leak caused by Cloudflare parser bug

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security

Hackers Attack Every 39 Seconds | 2017-02-10 | Security Magazine

Not surprising to anyone who has or had administered any servers that has open ports on the Internet. That is why the minimum you can do is to limit the attack surface by restricting Internet-facing ports, and using software like fail2ban to automatically ban attack attempts.

A Clark School study at the University of Maryland is one of the first to quantify the near-constant rate of hacker attacks of computers with Internet access—every 39 seconds on average—and the non-secure usernames and passwords we use that give attackers more chance of success.

Source: Hackers Attack Every 39 Seconds | 2017-02-10 | Security Magazine

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privacy security

Hackers Have Stolen Millions Of Dollars In Bitcoin — Using Only Phone Numbers

Often your phone is the weakest link to all of your online and sometimes offline identity. Someone wrote a detailed and lengthy advisory on how to protect yourself against such attacks.

The security loophole these hackers are milking can be used against anyone who uses their phone number for security for services as common as Google, iCloud, a plethora of banks, PayPal, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Twitter, and many others. The hackers have infiltrated bank accounts and tried to initiate wire transfers; used credit cards to rack up charges; gotten into Dropbox accounts containing copies of passports, credit cards and tax returns; and extorted victims using incriminating information found in their email accounts.

But the hackings should scare anyone with a mobile phone, an email account or an online bank account.

Source: Hackers Have Stolen Millions Of Dollars In Bitcoin — Using Only Phone Numbers

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privacy security

Hotel ransomed by hackers as guests locked in rooms

The tide of ransomware is gaining momentum. We will definitely see a lot more high profile cases of ransomware in 2017. As cyber-physical barrier becomes more fluid, so too will cyberattacks.

One of Europe’s top hotels has admitted they had to pay thousands in Bitcoin ransom to cybercriminals who managed to hack their electronic key system, locking hundreds of guests in or out of their rooms until the money was paid.

Source: Hotel ransomed by hackers as guests locked in rooms

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privacy security

Eyes Above The Waves: Disable Your Antivirus Software (Except Microsoft’s)

Hear, hear. I’ve always regarding AV software by the usual suspects as bloatware and it’s always the first thing I uninstall on new machines that came with them. It’s ironic how the public – and shockingly some IT professionals – gives AV vendors a free pass just because they market themselves as a panacea to the malware out there.

At best, there is negligible evidence that major non-MS AV products give a net improvement in security. More likely, they hurt security significantly; for example, see bugs in AV products listed in Google’s Project Zero. These bugs indicate that not only do these products open many attack vectors, but in general their developers do not follow standard security practices. (Microsoft, on the other hand, is generally competent.)

Source: Eyes Above The Waves: Disable Your Antivirus Software (Except Microsoft’s)

Categories
privacy security

Wide Impact: Highly Effective Gmail Phishing Technique Being Exploited

Phishing attacks are getting more creative, relying on moments of weakness in human perception. The tried-and-tested phishing method normally includes the domain name of the target site as part of the URL (eg. paypal.com-privacyprotection.com) and hope that the user doesn’t notice the actual domain (com-privacyprotection.com). This method takes it to another level ‘cos you will see the actual URL of the target site.

A new phishing technique that affects GMail and other services and how to protect yourself.

Source: Wide Impact: Highly Effective Gmail Phishing Technique Being Exploited